Parting Gifts
by Moonraykir
Summary: A promise can be made, and kept, or broken. A gift can be given, lost, and returned. One brother carries a blade, the other a stone, as a reminder of the one he would come home to.
1. Given

By some unspoken accord, she and Fíli find each other the night before he is to leave. There is not much to say that has not been said before. She knows how much the quest, the Mountain, means to him, though she cannot fully understand it, herself.

"I wish you didn't have to go," she admits to them both at last, pulling him close and burying her face in the fur of his coat.

"Hush; it will be okay," Fíli whispers, not really knowing how to assure her that there is no reason to fear. He smooths her hair, and she sighs a little, though in sadness or relief, he is not sure.

She pushes back from his embrace for a moment, just long enough to reach for something she wears at her belt.

"Take this," she says, and Fíli sees it is a knife, one of the beautiful ones her father makes. She slips her hand inside his coat and tucks the blade into the hidden pocket meant just for such a purpose. "Promise me you'll be careful."

"Of course I'll be safe if I carry that," Fíli tells her, and she wishes she could believe him.

She kisses him, longer and harder than she ever has before, winding her fingers in his hair as if she could keep him with her. He is touched by her desperation, yet wishes he could make her understand: he will be back. Of course he will be back.

She lays her head against his chest, over his heart, though she cannot feel its rhythm now, only the hard weight of her parting gift.

* * *

Kíli is doing a last check of the gear he has packed when he looks up to see her watching him from the doorway. He recognizes the expression on her face: she is troubled.

"While we're gone, Mum, just imagine us winning back a home for you," he says, his tone optimistic, even cheerful. He wants her to share the hope he feels.

"Yes," she says, almost, but not quite, smiling. "Make sure you listen to your uncle and Mister Dwalin," she tells him. It is what she says every time he leaves home with them, but Kíli can tell that she means something new by it. She is truly afraid of losing him this time.

"I'll come back; I promise," Kíli tells her, and he means it.

She enters the room and gathers him into her arms. "Oh, love," is all she says. She wants to tell him he goes into more dangers than he knows, but she is not sure he would really understand. Even so, she is reluctant to quell his enthusiasm—perhaps it is better he is fearless, undaunted. He will need all his courage, before the end.

Instead, once he has taken her face in his hands and kissed her, she catches his wrist and presses something to his palm. "Carry this and remember your promise," she says gently.

Kíli looks down at the stone in his hand; it bears a simple inscription that is both talisman and prayer: _return to me_.

"I will."

He tucks the stone in his pocket so that he cannot lose it. He will return it to her when he sees her again.

* * *

Author's note:

This fic was inspired by a Tumblr post by **filisleftmustachebraid** about her head cannon that the last knife confiscated from Fili in Mirkwood was a parting gift from the girl back home. As soon as I imagined that, I knew I had to write this. Also, **filisleftmustachebraid** posts fic on AO3 as **NowThatsDedication,** and I highly recommend _Never Fade_. It's a beautiful, heartbreaking, and yet ultimately hopeful post-BotFA fic about learning to remember the ones lost.


	2. Lost

They take the knife from him in Mirkwood. It is the last blade they find.

"Not that one! It was her gift," Fíli wants to protest, but he does not. It is a gift meant to protect, therefore a weapon, and therefore something he will not be allowed to keep.

For a moment, Fíli nearly wishes she had given him something else—a lock of hair, a precious stone, a letter (though that would certainly have been ruined by now). But she knows him, knows that he wants to think of her with a blade in his hand. She is someone to defend, to win a place for, to return to.

Fíli settles sideways onto the bench in his cell, his back against one wall, his feet propped against the other. It is too awkward to sit the usual way; his feet do not touch the ground. He feels somewhat naked now, without the sturdy knife-hilt pressed there against his chest where she had placed it and where she had sometimes laid her head.

To forget his frustration—with his loss, with this prison, and these elves—he imagines what it will be like welcoming her to Erebor. The Mountain is his home, so he has known all his life, but he is sure that it will not feel true until she is there with him. "Do you like it? It's for you," he will say. And she will laugh and forget the months of worry.

He passes easily into a daydream, a memory of finding her unexpectedly in her father's empty forge. _The red firelight has turned her flaxen hair to ruddy gold, and Fíli cannot tell if the glow in her cheek is her own or the fire's. Yet she does not draw back at his touch, and she kisses him before he has quite figured out how to ask her if he may..._

Fíli needs this vision of happiness and comfort too much; otherwise perhaps he would notice the murmur of conversation from his brother's cell, which is not far away.

* * *

He gives the stone away on the lakeshore, amidst ruin and pain and sorrow. For him, doing so is an affirmation of hope.

Perhaps Kíli was not meant to offer up his mother's gift, but it does not feel wrong. The stone is a talisman for luck, protection, love. He needs this woman to come back to him as much as his mother needs him to do the same. The elf knows what his promise means, and she will keep it safe for him. He is sure of that.

As they row away, Kíli does not stop himself from watching her on the shore, until the flame of her hair is swallowed up by the distance.

She was burning, last night, with her very own light. Kíli knows it was not merely the fever that changed her, unless perhaps it let him see her as she truly is. He told her the truth, then, though he cannot quite remember what he said. More than anything, he remembers that he touched her, and though she started, she did not draw back her hand.

All things taken together, he has laid himself bare to her. Perhaps he has frightened her, a little. Kíli knows there were tears in her eyes as she watched him go. But he does not fear. He is going to reclaim a mountain that never was his, but he understands now that if this new home is to mean something to him, he must bring to it everything that he loves.

He wonders if he should have kissed her before he climbed up into the boat. He supposes he would have, if she had not stood so high above him. And yet he is rather glad he did not. He would like her to make the gesture first. If she returns to him, he thinks she will.

Kíli turns to row in earnest, telling himself that the sooner they reach their destination, the sooner he can fulfill his promises.


	3. Returned

The elves gave back Fíli's weapons today. His mother saved one for her: a beautiful knife.

She looks down on it in her hands and feels her grief afresh, as if this were the first news and his death were not the pain she has woken to each morning since the raven came to Ered Luin.

She cannot keep the knife: she does not want it.

It is a reminder that her gift and his strong hands were not enough. If only she could have given him something else, something stronger still.

She has been to the vault only once before, here where Fíli lies at his uncle's right, heir to his throne and to his death. She hates it here; it is so still and silent and cold. This is not the right place for him, who was always so warm and laughing and bright. Even the runes that spell his name on the face of his tomb seem far too few to express all he really is, or was.

Who is he now when there is no more for him to say and nothing to give?

Is the blade still a weapon, when there is no-one left to defend? She lays the knife at his side, and it feels light and empty as a broken promise.

Then she crumples down over him and weeps, her tears cold as the stone they fall upon. If only he had not been a warrior. He might have been a smith, a jeweler, a tinker—anything, she does not care—so long as he might have died of old age, in bed with her hand in his, and some last endearment on his lips. Not on a mountainside, bloody and broken, his final words a battle cry. The image wracks her, as much as her sobs do.

They said Fíli died standing over uncle and brother. And as she looks down at the gift returned too late, she knows: he was the blade and he the shield, broken in defense of those he loved. What she had only tried to give, he truly had.

She no longer blames him for the promise he could not keep.

* * *

She almost turns the elf away. She has no desire to witness a stranger's grief for her son; she has enough pain in her heart without feeding it with another's. But in the end, courtesy and even perhaps kindness, change her mind.

"I've waited all these months," the elf says, with no preamble, "but I wanted to see where they buried him." Her face is shielded, impassive.

Kíli's mother nods. "I will take you."

In the vault, the elf stands looking down at the tomb for many minutes, as still as if she, too, has become stone. Then, in one fluid and yet somehow pained movement, she kneels, pressing her head to the runes of Kíli's name.

His mother turns away, not to spare herself from this young woman's pain, but because the moment is far too intimate to share.

She lets herself weep for him again, and so she is not sure when the elf arrives on silent feet to stand before her.

"Thank you," the flame-haired young woman says softly. She murmurs something in her own strange tongue—it sounds like a blessing—and then bows and goes.

Turning back to Kíli, his mother finds that the elf has left something on his tomb: the stone that was a talisman and a promise. They had never found it with him and so she had supposed it lost. But now she guesses: did he trade it away, and with it, his life to save that of the woman he loved? They said he had fought beside her at the end.

She lifts the stone to her lips, and then wonders if the elf has done the same with her own heart breaking because the lips she would have kissed are cold and still. His mother is sure of one thing: the elf woman's grief is real, and so her love is, too. Surely Kíli had cared for her; his gift was proof.

And so she lays the stone back down, sure, at last, that it is not quite a broken promise.

* * *

Author's note:

I'm improving a bit on the movie's version of Fili and Kili's deaths. I'm still cool with Kili somehow sacrificing himself for Tauriel, but I'm sure that could have happened just as easily at Thorin's side.

Oof, this was the hardest chapter to write without using proper names, but I avoided them for a reason. I wanted to make each brother the concrete center of a story that blurs around the edges from sorrow. I also wanted to suggest that the women that they've each made promises to all sort of blend together because of the grief and disappointment they share. The only identity they have in this tale is that of the bereaved. Anyway, I don't know if I succeeded, but it was a fun writing experiment nonetheless.

Fili's girl's wish that she had been there to catch his last words as he died in bed is taken straight out of Andromache's lament for Hector in the Iliad. She's still the most compelling tragic bride in literature, for my money. I always cry at her scenes in the poem.

All right, I got the angst out of my system and am ready to go back to writing happily ever after fluff and sweetness again. Gah.


End file.
